The New-Forged Holmes
by Andrea Foxx
Summary: From the start, Inspector Elizabeth Lestrade suspected that the Sherlock Holmes she wrenched from the grave was counterfeit: a forgery with origins in her own ambition.


The man she knew was could not be Sherlock Holmes.

Elizabeth Lestrade, Inspector for New Scotland Yard, had been told that what she had thought was Moriarty, was not Moriarty, and after an encounter and a half she believed it. The criminal was a clone, that was the hypothesis— later confirmed, but the legendary detective she'd fetched from the grave had the answer before the lab techs even knew there was data to process. The Moriarty that Lestrade knew from those old books and even the popular re-printings of now-ancient periodicals was asserted to be quieter, more methodical: an underworld emperor with subtlety and refinement. Class.. But the new model... the clone was nothing like the old spider-in-the-web that the Holmes upon a page had once cursed.

But the Holmes she knew was not that same one, either. It was impossible to see him as same man that sat in an inky tomb: immortal, yet immaterial. It had seemed simple when the crime wave had begun- a legendary menace appears, the legendary nemesis must too appear. But that was before she knew these complications, and exactly how she could get a different man from the same corpse.

It had all been a fairy tale, really. Centuries removed, immigration to the United States, return to mother London, and her family had been so long divorced of the legacy sworn to secrecy in their storage that Beth thought lightly of that body in the box. Seeing that grim face in the hovercar's window had been like staring back into that stony old photograph, in her grandfather's crumbling folio. Back then, exposure times were three seconds or more: no smiling, else the face would blur. Looking up Sir Evan Hargreaves and unlocking the family storehouse had been like a crazed dream.

In that fever state, hers was only the faintest hint of skepticism as she saw the fogged figure, locked inside the sealed casket: wrinkled as a withered branch. The honey inside had long crystallized and solidified. In her hands, she held candied cadaver.

It was then she first realized that the Sherlock Holmes that she had, even if he walked about, would not be the one made of ink, residing only in her imagination. She'd have, at best, she thought, an old man.

With the threat of Moriarty at hand, Lestrade took what she could get.

Hargreaves understandably had his doubts. But as Lestrade explained, she could see exactly why the man was hesitant even before the doctor began to speak at all. Raising a living human being from the dead was an ethical nightmare. How could she justify death of anyone at all, if she kicked it between the teeth for her own needs? There would me an outcry and a protest, if it became public that...

Elizabeth Lestrade told the doctor to perform what amounted to necromancy. But it wouldn't matter if the perp got away, and what was a perversion of nature or two along the way? Greyson had called after her with much worse a hundred times before.

And, amazingly, Hargreaves agreed to it. Just the once, as a theoretical test. The cellular regenerator, originally slated to be a foolproof life support machine and medium for organ transplants and regrowth, was all set to perform black magic.

It was then that Lestrade learned how the process worked.

"You see, we all are not fully the people we used to be," Hargreaves explained absently, even while he was chucking a mummy in a vat of hydrostatic plasma. "Every cell in the body dies, and is replaced at a different rate. Intestinal cells, only a few days. Skin, months, and the epidermis is dead tissue. Blood plasma may live on for six weeks, even postmortem. But the bones, the brain, they are permanent fixtures."

Hargreaves was gloating now. "My methods can change things, somewhat. Nanomachines latch on to dead cells, and replace their organelles, reanimating the tissue even if cell damage has occurred. Then, by forcing those cells to divide, the process of regeneration may be manually induced, replacing dead tissue with living flesh."

"It's his brain I need," insisted Lestrade. "Can you at least fix that?"

"That is the trickiest part, but I am confident," replied the doctor. "The nanobots may be calibrated to sense cellular variation, and reconstructing a brain with neural pathways intact will be difficult, but I believe doable. The last years of his life may be somewhat of a blur, as their connections and imprints in his memory will not be as ingrained as older paths. But you will have your champion, Miss Lestrade. I promise you that."

Behind the portly stature, cultured demeanor, and thick glasses, the scientist Hargreaves almost trembled with excitement. All the best ones were mad, Lestrade supposed. Looking at the remnant in the tank, Lestrade knew that here she was, to bring back the maddest, and best, of them all.

"Promises are nice," said Lestrade. "But I'd like to see your results. Alive, with an intact brain, please."

Hargreaves sat down to work, at a UI that made Lestrade dizzy. "Only that? Oh, I can do you much better," he said with pride. "Watch."

That evening was surreal.

For much of it, nothing seemed to be happening. But after the second hour, something convulsed under the man's wrinkled skin, clouded by the thick, gelatinous nutrient fluid. The man's limbs floated at odd angles, jellied. Lestrade watched, rapt as old bone matter was consumed by tiny machines, then recast into a new skeleton. A hunched, wizened form stretched taller than Lestrade thought was possible. His skin seemed to shrink, tightening over a thin, lanky figure.

"Look here now," Hargreaves said, enjoying hmself a little more than Lestrade thought appropriate. With adjustments of a few parameters, the man inside the tank convulsed weakly at first, then violently all over.

"Are you hurting him?" Lestrade asked, aghast at what for the moment was the world's only real zombie.

"Not at all," explained Hargreaves. "Without electrostatic stimulation, his muscles will regenerate atrophied. I assume you want him on his feet quite soon, don't you?"

Lestrade forced her mouth closed as what she had to remind herself was a dead, mummified, hundreds-year-old man developed a frame a professional athlete would envy.

"As soon as possible," Lestrade confirmed. "Excuse me, I'll meet him when he's... out of the bath," she said, and excused herself for a long cup of tea and a very brief (and unsuccessful) re-evaluation of her life.

He did not have the body of Sherlock Holmes, Lestrade thought. Not even in the literal sense. Every cell was fresh out of the box. A more complete, perfect, direct clone than Moriarty would be revealed as later, but a clone nonetheless. The only thing original would be, she had learned, the pathways forged in his legendary mind.

She could barely sleep for an hour and a half before she finally had to meet the man himself.

He didn't even look much like Sherlock Holmes.

Or at least, not the one that the old Watson had described. Perhaps the facial structure was the same, but this Holmes had eerily blue eyes: the perfect blue of a young child, and odd, bleached hair. The coloring had not aged in to the body, she learned; he literally had been born that day. It would take years for the legendary dark hair and pale grey eyes to return. Somewhere, two hundred years in the past, the original Sherlock Holmes had also come into the world blond, Lestrade guessed.

He did not act like Sherlock Holmes, Lestrade learned only a minute later. Yes, his habits were all there, save the tobacco and the cocaine, for regeneration had purged the addiction. Even his memories were all there, but there was something in the way he acted that was off... he repeated some phrases too often, with a dark gleam in his eye, privately witness to an unknown joke. He took to the modern world much more rapidly than Lestrade had prepared for; she had steeled herself for ages of explaining even the most basic things to him... but whether she had underestimated him as her predecessor had or that something else was at work, she didn't know.

For a man singularly devoted in his life to the minutiae of a historical London, he replaced and updated that knowledge with a sort of effortless voracity that left Elizabeth Lestrade agog. It was the insatiable assimilation of a young child learning a new language. His whole of knowledge, an attic full of only the most useful information, annexed with the new so quickly that Lestrade almost wanted to do extra research herself to keep up. No matter how futile it would be.

And while he was fond of explaining even the most basic details of life to everyone and everything, this Holmes had never once explained to her how her own job worked, how her own time worked, but merely listened— unflinching, interested as the hawk that a previous Watson had so often hinted him to be. He'd correct her later, but never on her own expertise. For the much-removed descendant of the infamously bungling Lestrade, the ancestor that her own grandparents had fled to the Americas to escape in legacy, Elizabeth Lestrade enjoyed an uncharacteristic amount of patience from the great detective.

He didn't even dress like Sherlock Holmes. The coat and hat... those were a cliche, even in his own time. Why had he requested them? Why had he chosen to look like a caricature of himself? There had to be a reason, thought Beth. The reason might have been obvious, but she was dreading her first conclusion.

That she had not revived the real Sherlock Holmes after all, but reforged a new one.

Exactly one year after that fateful day, and only after Watson had turned inside the interior of 221B Baker Street, Lestrade spoke her mind. It had been a hectic case, that day, but a simple one. Even Holmes seemed disappointed, visibly biting his lip, a weight of lethargy pressing his now-broad shoulders down. He hid his melancholy these days- in a future with centuries of catching up to do, this Holmes rarely found himself victim of the old shade of tiredness. But Lestrade knew that now, cases were all that remained of his identity, and that certainly must have been trying for him.

"You know, it's been bothering me," she said, halfway up the steps. "Maybe you can lay a question of mine to rest, Holmes."

"Really?" asked the great detective before her.

There was a heaviness in the syllables, though disguised. Lestrade was no Holmes, but she had her own ways of knowing things. Maybe even things the detective himself would overlook. Once she knew someone, sunk her teeth in, she never let go of them. Lestrade knew him well enough now to tell when his guard was down— rarely, but there were moments.

"Ask away, and we shall see."

"First I'll tell you what I've seen. From watching you," she said, carefully, mimicking the man's familiar phrasing. He liked when people did that. "Well, you don't look like Sherlock Holmes. And based on what I've read, you don't treat people like Sherlock Holmes did, really. You don't really act in the same way, either. You dress... as if you really want to convince somebody you're Sherlock Holmes, maybe somebody who only watched old vids. The way you talk, too. You know, sometimes I think you're overdoing it. Just a little."

If Holmes was surprised, he gave no sign of it, but took Lestrade apart with his eyes in a way only he could. The inspector could almost see her laundry list of evidence being dissected back there, behind his black pupils.

"Go on, then," he said in a purely businesslike tone. "And what is your conclusion?"

"I don't think you're the real Sherlock Holmes," she said bluntly. "I never really thought so, but you got the job done. And you haven't stopped since. Why complain? But it still bothers me."

Holmes digested this, cannibalizing the reason, churning it behind a face that Lestrade was stunned to see was less than icy. The man almost seemed pleased, and surprised. He stood taller, no longer with the suggestion of a stoop (psychological, Lestrade thought; she'd seen the man vault a hovercraft before) and the light returned to his face. It was like staring into a sun, a vortex with a gravity well and radiant intentions. It pulled her in and baked her to the bone.

"You remain ever engaging, Lestrade. That is a very daring, and sophisticated conclusion. Easing your conscience aside, I have to say that I agree."

"You... what?!"

Sherlock Holmes leaned in the doorway of his flat, smiling lazily as if Lestrade's confusion was a rare and precious vintage. "All things considered, I am not the 'real' Sherlock Holmes," he began. "Or rather, I am not the Sherlock Holmes you have thought of as real for much of your life."

Lestrade was agape.

"You know me from old journals, and from the stories published in the Strand long ago by your standards," Sherlock said. "But you cannot expect such things to convey detail as a firsthand account would. Such things convey emotion, attachment, and live on paper to those who behold them. This is why I was initially reluctant to allow John Watson to publish tales of my work and his involvement in it. On that page, that imperfect image takes on... a new life."

"I remember that," muttered Lestrade. "But the way it was written, it sounded like you just hated Watson's writing style."

"Dripping with romanticism and pomp? As always, and I would have nothing less. In fact, in my later years I encouraged him," Holmes reminisced. "The effect was intentional."

"But why?"

"I made many enemies, Lestrade," Holmes said, suddenly quite serious. The tone did not match his lips: incongruous between year-old skin and how _eighty-years-old_ his mentality surely was. Lestrade nearly mouthed a curse before she realized the man was decades removed from the depiction even approximated in her anthologies. All of which were rendered invisible by Sir Evan Hargreaves.

"There was a time when every lowlife in London had an unofficial bounty out upon my life. But so long as I enjoyed popularity, that the idea of a fantastic Sherlock Holmes never died, I could both shape an identity on my own terms and yet place myself as a fiction beyond assail. A mythic figure, of sorts. A modern Ulysses."

"You turned yourself into a meme... I mean, an idea. An idea that gets swapped around a lot," said Lestrade, with wonder.. "And so no one was able to find useful info on the real Holmes in the crosstalk. And after a while, people just assumed you weren't real and stopped going after you.. And you lived until you died of old age, keeping bees."

"Ah, but I did not really die," said Holmes, dusting off his hat in a demonstrative way. "For Sherlock Holmes lived on, on your radio, television, your video-games, in every possible medium. An immortality I enjoy even now."

He placed the deerstalker on his own head quite smugly.

"Zed...! You're in disguise," Lestrade swore. "This whole time... You've been in disguise as yourself! That's why you keep repeating the same things to everyone we meet, and using that dumb catchphrase you never said! People expect you to... and you're playing them!"

"It seems the only one I have played against, and lost against, is you," said Holmes. "And Watson of course, but I couldn't fool the man to begin with. Not even as a robot."

Lestrade was stunned. "So if you are not the real Sherlock Holmes, then who is?"

"I think you know him quite well already," he said "Only that you did not know what you were looking at. Keep use of your eyes and brains, and you may yet see him again."

Sherlock Holmes turned up to walk into the building, the fog pulling close around the doorfront. Even if it was autumn, Lestrade was warm in her uniform boots, infuriated by the most backhanded compliment of his condidence in her possible.

"Until inevitably tomorrow, my dear Lestrade."

She couldn't stay mad for long. Not when she heard the most sincerity in his tone that she had ever heard.

He was not the 'real' Sherlock Holmes, but she no longer minded.

He was the Sherlock Holmes that kept Elizabeth Lestrade quite dear to him. And that was as real as she could ever ask for.

* * *

A/N:

This short one-shot is sort of a thank-you to the incredibly campy cartoon that I liked as a kid. It didn't change my life, it didn't give me tons of inspiration... but it was fun, and it made me happy on Saturday mornings, and that's good enough for me.

But even when I was a little kid I liked Sherlock Holmes and the differences between this cartoon and the real thing always tortured me, so as a comfort for Little Me, I have written a band-aid to make it all better and explain the maddening design and scripting choices that plagued the weekend-morning shmooze material. I hope it brings other people some closure, too.


End file.
